


Turn Off All Experiments Before You Leave The Building Please

by dedougal



Category: The Losers (2010)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-05
Updated: 2011-04-05
Packaged: 2017-10-17 15:16:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/178207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dedougal/pseuds/dedougal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steampunk Losers. And no, it's not AU. Title is a Girl Genius reference.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turn Off All Experiments Before You Leave The Building Please

When Jensen flicked switches, the ground shuddered.

No. Literally.

Turns out that valves and pipes and honest to god wheels that crank pistons and cause boiling steam to shoot out of all sorts of bizarre corners at all sorts of angles (sorry, Pooch) will actually cause something that could be measured on the Richter scale. If the Richter scale had been invented.

 

Clay looks weirdly at home here. Except, you know, from the fact that he doesn’t have his usual guns. Turns out that a white shirt and black pants will pretty much fit in anywhere. Add a flat cap and a vest and he looks like any of the other workers currently streaming away from the docks. No one else, however, has gone there searching for a glowing blue light. Or a green one. Or a fucking pink one. No, these people speaking a million languages are there to load and tote and get paid a pittance. Clay knows how they feel. Grunt work is not fun in any century.

Colonels are supposed to have others to carry out their grunt work. Unfortunately, his grunts are full of all kinds of excuses.

Aisha just gives him this look when he suggests a dress and grinds the edge of her knife a little bit sharper. Pooch makes some kind of exaggerated “suh” sound and Jensen… Better not to let Jensen out of the building. He’s been a little giddy since he got here. The lack of computers have made him go a little nuts. Cougar just gives him this look. The look says more than a thousand words of Jensen’s protests. His look says ask and you die.

Clay leaves him to guard Jensen. Turns out, speaking English with an American accent gets you all sorts of access. Claiming that his daddy came from Ireland gets him even more. Clay shrugs. It might even be true. His mother never was too certain about that.

 

Pooch knew there were rules about not going into the light, but when the light sucks you up and spits you out without as much as an option, he’s fairly sure the rules don’t apply. Also, turns out that time travel is not just something that belongs to Michael J Fox. One minute they’re bugging out of a fleabag motel in Nowhere, Nevada seconds ahead of Max’s goons, the next there’s this light that Pooch swears blind was yellow and they’re falling into the harbour.

And when the harbour is the city’s sewer and waste disposal facility, that shit is nastier than anything that diapers might hold. And he knows diapers.

Turns out that New York was a pretty similar city back then. Green got you anything, even one room between five. No one needed to know that the dollars they’d been carrying were “borrowed” with extreme prejudice from a couple of drunks who’d decided that Aisha was some kind of hooker. After one of them had taken a knee to the face when he’d criticised her fashion choices and the other had realised that the pretty little girl they’d cornered was backed by four pissed off, hulking, wet guys who stank, there had been an accommodation reached.

 

Aisha was not wearing a corset. No matter what anyone said.

 

Jensen had this thing about how steampunk was just goths who had discovered brown. At least, that was what he claimed as he muttered at the contraption in the corner of the attic room that they’d been encouraged to move to after Clay and Aisha had spent an afternoon being over-friendly to each other. Cougar had been in the hallway persuading the landlord that there was no reason to worry about the room when Jensen had come back from wherever he’d been rooting around.

Cougar managed to do all the persuading with a glare and a tip of his hat. Jensen was impressed.

Jensen had also managed to nearly get his head taken off by the flying crockery. His brand new(ish), elbow length brown leather gloves wouldn’t help much with that.

 

Pooch limped over to the beat up chair that was one of the few pieces of furniture the landlord had been left with after that incident. His leg stung like a mother. Being scalded was not his idea of fun. Jensen was busy fiddling with the proper alignment of pipes now. Cougar would lean over to hand him a wrench now and again.

“Good news. I know how to get us home. Bad news. I don’t know how near to home I’m going to be able to get us.” Jensen was ready to go into some kind of explanation. He was wearing some kind of goggles over his spectacles.

Clay held up his hand. “You know what, just do it.”

“Will you buy me a pony?” Jensen totally deserved the way everyone else in the room flipped him the bird.

 

In the end, Aisha decided, the light was aquamarine. And she hated next gen tech and the idiots that used it more than she hated the losers she got sucked back in time with. They’d be next on her list. Honest.


End file.
